Recently, LinkedIn has started adding people based on your email contacts to their “People You May Know” page. Just to be clear, this is people who do not have a LinkedIn account already, so attempting to add them will have LinkedIn send them a mail on your behalf.

You might note that they cleverly have made them look almost identical to how people who actually have accounts on LinkedIn, so it’s very easy to inadvertently send an invite to someone while using this page.

I don’t quite like the thought of that, so I made a userscript that removes the email entries from the listing, showing only people with pre-existing accounts.

In connection with hacking competitions, the different teams often do write-ups explaining their solutions after the contest is over. I quite like that concept, so I thought I’d share our solutions for the NCPC problems.

This time, it’s a script that highlights posts made by friends. The script automatically reads your buddy list when you visit your user control panel, so you don’t need to do any manual maintenance of your friends list.

I had previously made the same feature for the SALR extension for Chrome, but seeing as I don’t use that anymore, I decided to remake it in stand-alone form.

Next time you typeset a LaTeX document, where you discuss some Haskell code, consider using the following command to typeset the name:

% To be added to your preamble:
\usepackage{hyperref}
% Format function name and link to it on Hoogle
\newcommand{\hoogle}[1]{\href{http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=#1}{\texttt{#1}}}

That is, instead of I use the function \texttt{liftM2} to lift ..., use I use the function \hoogle{liftM2} to lift ....

What the command does is not only format the function name in a fixed-width font using \texttt, but also link it to a Hoogle-search, to allow the reader to easily look up what the function does, in case it’s unknown to them.

So you’re a student at the University of Copenhagen, and you’re starting on a new course. Wouldn’t it be lovely if you could add your schedule to your calendar, so that you could keep track of when to be where?

Well, Rasmus Wriedt Larsen has devised a website, KU Calendar Helper, which automatically produces an ICAL feed you can add to your Google Calendar or similar. You can simply input the URL to the course schedule, and it’ll do the boring work for you.

You may already know imgur, an image host you can use freely for whatever you please.

An interesting fact about them, however, is that each picture given a name consisting of only 5 alphanumerical characters. This leaves for roughly 916 million different names. As it turns out, there appears to be around 90 million uploaded images[1], which means that if we randomly guess a name for a file, we have an about 1 in 10 chance of actually finding an image.

Those odds are pretty good, so I wrote a small application which does just that.

Quines are a wonderful thing. A quine is a program, that when run produces its own code as output. Now, in most interpreted languages you can read your own code through means of I/O — I’d consider that cheating: We can do much better than that. We’ll do it without anything but a clever theoretical result. (And maybe a little bit of code to make it work in practice.)[…]

It’s that time of year again; the new students have started at DIKU and start their careers as computer science students with the course DiMS — Discrete Mathematical Structures, taught from the book by the same name.

Part of the curriculum is learning about Hasse diagrams, which in essence are a way of easily visualizing the relationships between different elements under a partial order.

Now, a student came and asked me about how to draw these diagrams in Mathematica, so I got some code working which did just that. The resulting diagram, is the picture used for this post.[…]

When you’re a student, you’re usually on a tight budget, so the chance to get something you need at a steep discount usually falls on good soil.

Luckily, the marketing departments of many large software corporations know this, and wants to get you hooked on their applications, leaving us students very happy.

First of all, it’s worth checking if your school or university participates in the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance, or MSDNAA for short. If that is the case, you may be eligible to get free copies of Windows, Visual Studio and much more. Simply head on over and search for your school to see if you can get lovely free software. If your school does show up in the list, ask your local IT department if it’s possible to get an account. (If you study at DIKU, you can sign up here.)

Microsoft provides another way to get free software called DreamSpark. DreamSpark provides free access to lots of free development software for students at participating schools, in a manner similar to that of MSDNAA. Sadly, University of Copenhagen does not appear to be a part of this deal, but your university might be; simply go to the page and follow the instructions to log in.

Next up is OnTheHub, with which your school might have struck a deal to provide cheap software from Microsoft, Adobe, VMware and more. Simply head on over to their search page, and see if your school is listed. University of Copenhagen has a deal with VMware, for instance, which means we get free copies of VMware Workstation, among other things. In case nothing is available for your school, you can also take a look at their store, which may contain something useful.